I would
have to apply for it, take a test, wait a while and there are stringent laws
about storing weapons, but still, if I was so inclined, as a law abiding Canadian
citizen, I could become a gun owner.

If I wasn't
a law abiding Canadian, buta member of
the criminal world, I guess I could go downtown and buy a gun on the street.

But, in
general, Canadians don't want to be gun owners.

So why the
big difference between us and our BFF the Americans?

I mean we
are small in population, sitting next to their massive, militaristic country that
has invaded us once already.

Why aren't
we armed to the teeth?

One
explanation that has come up in my recent conversations with people, is that we
always had the British army here keeping the peace in pre-Confederation days
and behaving ourselves just became our norm.

Of course
they weren't here to keep the peace, they were here protecting British
interests, but law and order was a natural side bar activity.

And shortly
after Confederation arrived in 1867 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(Northwest Mounted Police in those days), with their red jackets so reminiscent
of the British army, was established by an act of parliament.

And if you
are in any doubt about how they affected our Canadian identity, you must read
some of the stories about the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898.

Like a lot
of the American west, Alaska was a crime ridden, death zone for the gold
seekers, but when they reached the Canadian border at the top of the Chilcoot
Pass they were met by Sam Steele of the NWMP.

He and his
small band of Mounties ensured the law was obeyed on this side of the border.

The upshot
of this is that we never developed a fear of other Canadians,

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

English: One of the corridors on the lower level of the cloister with statues of the God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. At the Viceregal Museum in Zinacantepec, Mexico State (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my small Muslim students once told me, (with great
amusement), that God has no relatives.

***

The Christian God is a Trinity - the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit, (aka Wisdom or Sophia).

God's human relatives are Mary, the Mother of God, Joseph
who would be, (and this is the only palatable relationship), God's step-father
and if you happen to be Protestant then the siblings of Jesus would be God's
half brothers and sisters.

And of course there were probably cousins of God.

That's quite a gang around the cosmic dinner table

and I had never seen it through someone else's eyes until
that moment.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Cropped screenshot of David Niven from the trailer for the film The Toast of New Orleans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although they were supposedly still looking for a route
to the Orient by travelling down the St. Lawrence and into the Great Lakes, the
truth is that the French were so enamoured of their new land that by 1611 the
Jesuits had set up shop.

They were quickly followed by the first settlers.

Many babies later New
France was thriving.

If the British were having
sex and making babies in those days it wasn't happening in the New World.

Friday, November 16, 2012

English
Canada isn't 'English' the way French Canada is French and it never really was.

Even the first 'Anglo' who stepped ashore, i.e., John
Cabot, was actually an Italian named Zuan Chabotto.

But the Italian House of Medici was more interested in
having sex and making poison than in conquering new worlds so Cabot claimed
Newfoundland and/or Cape Breton Island for Henry VII of England on June 24,
1497.

Thirty-seven years after Cabot disappeared, probably somewhere
in the mid Atlantic, Jacques Cartier swanned into town and rudely claimed the New
World for France
without even a tip of his chapeau to England.

In this series of blogs I want to take a look at the struggle that
went into building this big, beautiful, ungainly, polite, self-destructive, honourable,
loyal, courageous, sparsely populated, welcoming, unwelcoming, unique, (feel
free to add your own adjectives), country called Canada.

I have no plans or timeline, (bloggers are so free), it will just be a
commentary on our history the way I see it and I guess it will appear when I
feel like it.